4 ms·

The title seems misleading, and reading the article explains the reason more clearly. There's nonsense OKR's and objectives at these companies to burn as many t

The title seems misleading, and reading the article explains the reason more clearly. There's nonsense OKR's and objectives at these companies to burn as many tokens as possible. It turns out that when you make a metric out of token usage, it unsurprisingly ends up becoming extremely expensive. Inference is affordable, and you don't need a SOTA proprietary model to get a lot of use out of this technology. While you likely will still need a human engineer for quite a while longer, I don't agree that some number of humans + an LLM is going to be (or will ever remain) more expensive than just hiring more humans.

leecommamichael 4mo ago
I kind of doubt they ever needed the number of humans they have, but I am genuinely open to being wrong about that.
- no-name-here 4mo ago
  If big tech companies actually offered support to users when the company bans their account or other real issues…
andwur 4mo ago
They may as well have just said: Company institutes an OKR that the IT division must spend over $1000/day/developer (fictious number). Company is surprised when IT division is costing far more than it did before. Company increases this to $1500/day/developer to build a system to identify why this has happened. I feel like vibe coding is less of an issue than vibe leadership at this point, and vibe leadership has nothing inherently to do with AI. These people are getting a vague feeling in their giblets, and then chasing it to the illogical conclusion no matter the cost or outcome.
- juancb 4mo ago
  I'm not sure that vibe leadership is a new thing and in fact may be a redundant term. I've worked for enough companies to get the sense that doggedly following vague feelings in their giblets is what leadership has been since 2008. I won't deny that sometimes it works but there's much more coverage on when it does that when it fails which only serves to amplify the survivorship bias around it.
- VincePlatt 4mo ago
  Solution: Replace the leadership mandating AI with AI. I'll bet not even AI would mandate it to the same extent.
baron816 4mo ago
The media seems hellbent on torching AI. My news feeds are nothing but stories about the evils of data centers, how useless AI is, and how much everyone hates it.
- ian_j_butler 4mo ago
  The media is hellbent on torching it, and on propping it up against all reason too, both things can be true. HN is no exception. It's another noisy room problem where the distortion in dialogue is rapidly leading us into a distorted reality. https://thenoisyroom.com/ https://thenoisyroom.com/ For people who are actually interested in reality, participation in the mainstream discourse either way is a strategic error. The best thing to do is to check out from all of it, actually read the literature and listen to the technical heros who are working at the edge, and stop reading the pro/anti marketing noise from the media or corporate PR
  - parineum 4mo ago
    > listen to the technical heros who are working at the edge Sounds like a great way to get the rose colored view.
    - ian_j_butler 4mo ago
      Again you're probably thinking of the forum discussion / booster blogs / executive interviews that I'm suggesting you should leave behind. Papers are the only place left where nuance is even allowed and might actually be encouraged. Just try it, you'll be surprised. Depends on the research but.. a lot of it is kind of incentivized to align with AI skeptics actually because it leaves many things open for invention, study, and fixes
  - boca_honey 4mo ago
    > and listen to the technical heros who are working at the edge that's terrible advice. those guys dedicate their lives to the advancement of this field. there's no way you will get a tempered, balanced answer from them. none of them will gravitate towards "yeah, maybe we should stop or slow down for a while".
alexwwang 4mo ago
I am afraid that the TL would be uncomfortable if they have no human team members but only agents, which means they have no space to pass the bulk and have to take responsibilities for the business results.
olalonde 4mo ago
Also, from the article it seems they just switched from one LLM (Claude Code) to another one (GitHub Copilot) rather than abandoning "AI"...
- bostik 4mo ago
  And in a way this feels like a good thing (from a corporate strategy perspective). If MS really wants to compete with Claude Code they will need to dogfood to have even a hope of ever catching up. As much as I may dislike MS, their software or their practices I have to admit that they have pulled this off at least once before. Back in 2019/2020 their Teams web client was absolutely atrocious and utterly unusable on Linux. Sometime in 2023/2024 it had become quite tolerable and worked mostly better than Google Meet. (Screen sharing options in Teams suck to this day, though.)
repeekad 4mo ago
But aren’t the revenue numbers that have investors foaming at the teeth based on that “tokens as a metric” world? It can’t be both an explosive growth business and also only ROI with more disciplined spend.
- Paradigma11 4mo ago
  Why can't it be both?
phyzix5761 4mo ago
Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
verisimi 4mo ago
OKR: Objectives and Key Results

leecommamichael 4mo ago

I kind of doubt they ever needed the number of humans they have, but I am genuinely open to being wrong about that.

no-name-here 4mo ago
If big tech companies actually offered support to users when the company bans their account or other real issues…

andwur 4mo ago

They may as well have just said: Company institutes an OKR that the IT division must spend over $1000/day/developer (fictious number). Company is surprised when IT division is costing far more than it did before. Company increases this to $1500/day/developer to build a system to identify why this has happened. I feel like vibe coding is less of an issue than vibe leadership at this point, and vibe leadership has nothing inherently to do with AI. These people are getting a vague feeling in their giblets, and then chasing it to the illogical conclusion no matter the cost or outcome.

juancb 4mo ago
I'm not sure that vibe leadership is a new thing and in fact may be a redundant term. I've worked for enough companies to get the sense that doggedly following vague feelings in their giblets is what leadership has been since 2008. I won't deny that sometimes it works but there's much more coverage on when it does that when it fails which only serves to amplify the survivorship bias around it.
VincePlatt 4mo ago
Solution: Replace the leadership mandating AI with AI. I'll bet not even AI would mandate it to the same extent.

baron816 4mo ago

The media seems hellbent on torching AI. My news feeds are nothing but stories about the evils of data centers, how useless AI is, and how much everyone hates it.

ian_j_butler 4mo ago
The media is hellbent on torching it, and on propping it up against all reason too, both things can be true. HN is no exception. It's another noisy room problem where the distortion in dialogue is rapidly leading us into a distorted reality. https://thenoisyroom.com/ https://thenoisyroom.com/ For people who are actually interested in reality, participation in the mainstream discourse either way is a strategic error. The best thing to do is to check out from all of it, actually read the literature and listen to the technical heros who are working at the edge, and stop reading the pro/anti marketing noise from the media or corporate PR
- parineum 4mo ago
  > listen to the technical heros who are working at the edge Sounds like a great way to get the rose colored view.
  - ian_j_butler 4mo ago
    Again you're probably thinking of the forum discussion / booster blogs / executive interviews that I'm suggesting you should leave behind. Papers are the only place left where nuance is even allowed and might actually be encouraged. Just try it, you'll be surprised. Depends on the research but.. a lot of it is kind of incentivized to align with AI skeptics actually because it leaves many things open for invention, study, and fixes
- boca_honey 4mo ago
  > and listen to the technical heros who are working at the edge that's terrible advice. those guys dedicate their lives to the advancement of this field. there's no way you will get a tempered, balanced answer from them. none of them will gravitate towards "yeah, maybe we should stop or slow down for a while".

alexwwang 4mo ago

I am afraid that the TL would be uncomfortable if they have no human team members but only agents, which means they have no space to pass the bulk and have to take responsibilities for the business results.

olalonde 4mo ago

Also, from the article it seems they just switched from one LLM (Claude Code) to another one (GitHub Copilot) rather than abandoning "AI"...

bostik 4mo ago
And in a way this feels like a good thing (from a corporate strategy perspective). If MS really wants to compete with Claude Code they will need to dogfood to have even a hope of ever catching up. As much as I may dislike MS, their software or their practices I have to admit that they have pulled this off at least once before. Back in 2019/2020 their Teams web client was absolutely atrocious and utterly unusable on Linux. Sometime in 2023/2024 it had become quite tolerable and worked mostly better than Google Meet. (Screen sharing options in Teams suck to this day, though.)

repeekad 4mo ago

But aren’t the revenue numbers that have investors foaming at the teeth based on that “tokens as a metric” world? It can’t be both an explosive growth business and also only ROI with more disciplined spend.

Paradigma11 4mo ago
Why can't it be both?

phyzix5761 4mo ago

Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

verisimi 4mo ago

OKR: Objectives and Key Results